British literature

Modernism and cultural revivals: 1901-1945

BLAST First politeness, ENGLAND

CURSE ITS CLIMATE FOR ITS SINS AND INFECTIONS

DISMAL SYMBOL, SET round our bodies,

•f effeminate lout within.

VICTORIAN VAMPIRE, the LONDON cloud suck* the TOWN'S heart

A 1000 MILE LONG, 2 KILOMETER Deep

BODY OF WATER m, Is pushed against us from the Ftoridas, TO MAKE US MILD.

OFFICIOUS MOUNTAINS keep back DRASTIC WINDS

SO MUCH VAST MACHINERY TO PRODUCE

THE CURATE of “Eitw BRITANNIC /ESTHETE WILD NATURE CRANK DOMESTICATED

POLICEMAN LONDON COLISEUM SOCIALIST-PLAYWRIGHT DALY S MUSICAL COMEDY BAIETY CHORUS 6IRL TMKS

The first section of Wyndham Lewis' Manifesto, Blast 1, 1914 Main articles: Literary modernism and Modernism

From around 1910 the Modernist movement began to in­fluence British literature. While their Victorian prede­cessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th-century writers often felt alien­ated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of ac­ceptable content.

1. 
   First World War
   

A statue of Hedd Wyn in Trawsfynydd

The experiences of the First World War were reflected in the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon. In Parenthesis, an epic poem by David Jones first published in 1937, is a notable work of the literature of the First World War, that was influenced by Welsh traditions, de­spite Jones being born in England. In non-fiction prose. T. E. Lawrence's (Lawrence of Arabia) autobiographical account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire is important.

Thomas Hardy



Main article: Modernist poetry in English

Two Victorian poets who published little in the 19th cen-
tury, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), have since come to be regarded as major poets. While Hardy first established his reputation the late 19th century with novels, he also wrote poetry throughout his career. However he did not publish his first collection until 1898, so that he tends to be treated as a 20th-century poet.^[117] Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems were posthumously published in 1918 by Robert Bridges.

Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era, with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were especially associated. T. S. Eliot (1888­1965) was born American, migrated to England in 1914, and he was “arguably the most important English- language poet of the 20th century.”^[118] He produced some of the best-known poems in the English language, including "The Waste Land" (1922) and Four Quartets (1935-1942).^[119]

The Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and John Masefield (1878-1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a more conserva­tive approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sen­timentality and hedonism. Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet.^[120]

In the 1930s the Auden Group, sometimes called simply the Thirties poets, was an important group of politically left-wing writers, that included W. H. Auden (1907-73) and two Anglo-Irish writers, Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72) and Louis MacNeice (1907-1963). Auden was a ma­jor poet who had a similar influence on subsequent po­ets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot had had on earlier

generations.^[121]

3. 
   Modernist novel
   

Rudyard Kipling, 1912

While modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. Novelists include: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who was also a successful poet; H. G. Wells (1866-1946); John Galsworthy (1867-1933), (No­bel Prize in Literature, 1932), whose novels include The Forsyte Saga (1906-21); Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) author of The Old Wives’ Tale (1908); G. K. Chester­ton (1874-1936); E.M. Forster (1879-1970). The most popular British writer of the early years of the 20th cen­tury was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature

(1907).^[122]

H. G. Wells was a highly prolific author who is now best known for his work in the science fiction genre.^[123] His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine, written in the 1890s. Forster’s A Passage to India 1924, reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier works such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in Eng-

land.